Obama: a Great Communicator plus

Dancing with Fire asks what the best Barack moment has been. Immediately I thought of the impressive gathering at the St. Louis Arch on Saturday. Rousing 100,000+ Americans from the comfort of their homes normally takes something like a Penn State game. But a politician talking about the economy?

Reading the first two comments at DWF veered me from my initial thought’s on Obama’s ability to draw a crowd. The comments seemed to be the typical “a great speech does not make the man.” Ronald Reagan gave great speeches and was dubbed the Great Communicator. Barack Obama is being held to a different standard. That’s fine. Reagan should have been held to a different and higher standard.

The best Barack moment came for me and my family in Selma, Alabama on the anniversary of Bloody Sunday in March 2007. Senator Obama was moving into position for the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. I had my 10-year-old son on my shoulder yelling “Obama! Obama!” trying to get the senator’s attention, and a woman next to us burst into tears. She told us she was a history teacher, and she never thought she’d ever see the day where a little white boy would be cheering on a black man for the President of the United States of America. My oldest son did a report on it, and I blogged about it here with images from that day:

Dismissive remarks about Barack Obama as just a guy who gives good speeches REALLY miss the point. He knows his country…its history, its constitution and laws, he loves his country and its story…his better speeches weave together a narrative about America that inspires.

It wasn’t a Barack Obama speech that gave me my best Barack moment; it was the African-American history teacher that wept when she saw a little white boy cheering on a black presidential candidate, not for the color of his skin but for the content of his character.